I’m happy to report that health care reform looks much less dead than it did two months ago. At this very moment, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is wrestling up support for this weekend’s big vote — that’s right, a vote on the Senate health care bill that passed back in December. Today comes the welcome news that the bill will (somehow) reduce the deficit, or so says the Congressional Budget Office.

These reforms won’t fix everything wrong with health care. Not by a long stretch. But it will bring health insurance to millions of people who didn’t have it before. At the risk of beating a dead horse, we need that. Desperately.

audrey young

I'm a general internist from Seattle. My first book was What Patients Taught Me. The latest book is House of Hope and Fear, published in August 2009, and now out in paperback. For more about both books and about physician writers, please visit my website.